It may be observed, however, in extenuation even for such seeming high-handed measures, that as slavery was an acknowledged institution rearing itself up on the Constitution, and that some 4,000,000 of human creatures were chained to it, it was absolutely necessary to keep them in ignorance of any sympathy existing for their degraded state either in the North or the South, lest such sympathy should excite them to resistance. Hence every thing that was calculated to throw light on their benighted pathway, and strengthen any lingering preconceived idea that they were men and not beasts of burden, was kept studiously away from them. As long as this country sanctioned the existence of slavery, just so long was she justified in protecting those States sustaining it from any outbreak on the part of its victims. It was an evil that came in under the Constitution, and it was an evil it was bound to sustain. The anti-slavery party North carried their views far beyond common sense and simple reason; and this led to Southern opposition. But the more enlightened people viewed both parties as acting wrong, and in opposing the first they as strongly repudiated the acts of the latter. And what has been the consequence? The South, alone in its crime, alone in its inhuman traffic, alone in its crushing power to make men beasts of burden,—even lower in the animal scale than the animal itself,—like Lucifer, rebelled against its country and its God. Thus, slaveholders became barbarians by the very act of attempting to rivet the chains of bondage on man and his country. That rebellion recreated in our midst a new order, or rather carried out the very spirit of the Declaration of Independence, declaring that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, “Free and Independent States.” There can be no such thing as freedom, if its meaning be linked to the chains of slavery. There is no true freedom for an American to boast of, if one portion of the land sustains slavery and laughs at the sound of the lash as it lacerates the back of a bondsman in the nineteenth century. Age of Christianity! age of refinement! age of letters! What a misnomer!
This feeling, which had a tendency to divide the South from the North, was gradually assuming a dangerous aspect. It was a feeling antagonistical to that which prevailed in the North. The one was allied to the age of barbarism, the other to the highest order of civilization. The worst passions of bad men were working the evil; they engendered hatred and malice; and the rising popularity of the North for its intelligence, its institutions, its educational system, its arts, its sciences, and, in fact, all that a high state of intellectual knowledge produces, added fuel to the hellish fire that was burning in the Southern breast.
They could boast of only one institution, and that was slavery. This institution sent forth
“the piercing cry
Which shook the waves and rent the sky:
E’en now, e’en now, on yonder western shores
Weeps pale Despair, and writhing Anguish roars;
E’en now on Afric’s groves, with hideous yell
Fierce Slavery stalks, and slips the dogs of hell;